Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.

  • DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Copy and paste mirror

    [Mod Post] The Future of IAmA : IAmA

    To our users, AMA guests, and friends,

    You may have noticed that, in spite of our history of past protests against Reddit’s poor site management, this subreddit has refrained from protesting or shutting down during the recent excitement on Reddit.

    This does not imply that we think things are being managed better now. Rather, it reflects our belief that such actions will not make any significant difference this time.

    Rather than come up with new words to express our concerns, I think some quotes from the NYT Editorial we wrote back in 2015 convey our thoughts very well:

    Our primary concern, and reason for taking the site down temporarily, is that Reddit’s management made critical changes to a very popular website without any apparent care for how those changes might affect their biggest resource: the community and the moderators that help tend the subreddits that constitute the site. Moderators commit their time to the site to foster engaging communities.

    Reddit is not our job, but we have spent thousands of hours as a team answering questions, facilitating A.M.A.s, writing policy and helping people ask questions of their heroes. We moderate from the train or bus, on breaks from work and in between classes. We check on the subreddit while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at the D.M.V.

    The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.

    We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site.

    Amazing how little has changed, really.

    So, what are we going to do about this? What can we change? Not much. Reddit executives have shown that they won’t yield to the pressure of a protest. They’ve told the media that they are actively planning to remove moderators who keep subreddits shut down and have no intentions of making changes.

    So, moving forward, we’re going to run IAmA like your average subreddit. We will continue moderating, removing spam, and enforcing rules. Many of the current moderation team will be taking a step back, but we’ll recruit people to replace them as needed.

    However, effective immediately, we plan to discontinue the following activities that we performed, as volunteer moderators, that took up a huge amount of our time and effort, both from a communication and coordination standpoint and from an IT/secure operations standpoint:

    1. Active solicitation of celebrities or high profile figures to do AMAs.

    2. Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary).

    3. Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.

    4. Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.

    5. Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.

    6. Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.

    7. Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts

    Moving forward, we’ll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn’t mean we’re allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you’ll need to pay more attention.

    Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.

    Thanks for the ride everyone, it’s been fun.

    Sincerely,

    The IAmA Moderator Team (2013-2023)

    • Pika@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      thank you for posting this, it annoys me to no end the amount of “omg this happened now on reddit” posts that link to the source on reddit. Like that defeats the purpose of leaving the platform if I’m forced to go back anyway and give them traffic. Make a mirror, stop giving the site more traffic lol

      • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yep, it’s still clingy with the direct links and the constant posts, so many saying “Reddit is DEAD to me!”… yet they keep on talking non-stop about Reddit.

    • Stealth_Bummer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah theres no point in mods making a community a special place when reddit is going out of their way to shit on the mods and users.

    • DudePluto@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s pretty insane the amount of work they did for free. I never even thought about the effort that went into a sub like that. Good for them

    • brave@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      Wow the mods were really working hard to make IAMA a special place. Hope the drop in quality becomes clear …

    • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Thank you for posting this. I still have RIF installed and refuse to download the reddit app, so I can’t see the original post. Appreciate it.

      • Zak@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        refuse to download the reddit app, so I can’t see the original post

        Rumor has it, Reddit has a website.

        • Pika@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          idk about others but, I left that site because I don’t agree with their policies, I would much rather have a mirror then give the site more traffic.

        • impulse@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Sure, but why grace the dumpster fire with traffic, when you also can just copy the relevant parts here?

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Oh man, I’m not going back to Reddit, but it would almost be worth it to watch all the fake celebrity trolls do AMAs.